Friday, 23 November 2012

The voice of the academic left? Not in my name.

This open letter, condemning ‘the Israeli
assault on the defenceless people of the Gaza strip', angered and saddened me
so much that it has finally lured me out of my extended blogging hibernation. The
letter, sent to the Irish Left Review but no doubt also published in other
earnest left-wing journals, is signed by no fewer than 136 academics. Some of
them are the usual suspects – the far-left anti-Zionist Ilan Pappe, the Hamas
spokesman and suicide bombing apologist Azzam Tamimi – but among the others are
one or two people I vaguely know, others whose academic work I admire, and at
least one (Judith Butler) whose writing I used to like but whose naïve interventions on this particular issue have caused me to re-evaluate
everything she’s written.

The letter made me angry because I believe
it is wrong on almost every level: every sentence is stuffed with lies and
half-truths. And it made me sad because
this collection of intellectual worthies seemed to be presenting themselves as
the combined voice of the ‘academic left’. I'm an academic – have been for
the better part of a quarter of a century. I am also of ‘the Left’, a paid-up
Labour member who has nevervoted
for any other party (unless you count a tactical vote for the Liberals in a
Tory safe seat thirty years ago), whose political thinking has been shaped by
the likes of Ruskin, Morris, Raymond Williams, E P Thompson, plus
a smattering of early Marx, feminism and anti-racism. And yet when I read this,
the supposed collective voice of the ‘academic left’, I feel nothing but alienation and
revulsion, and want to cry out: ‘Not in my name!’

The letter is short, so a line-by-line
fisking is in order. Here’s the first sentence:

We the undersigned watch with horror yet
another ruthless and criminal Israeli assault on the defenceless people of
the Gaza Strip.

You
would never know from this that Israel’s ‘assault’ came after a week in which
hundreds of rockets were launched indiscriminately from Gaza towards residential areas in Israel. Surely, if anything was ‘ruthless’ or ‘criminal’, it was this series of unprovoked terrorist attacks on innocent civilians. This lack of informing
context is, to say the least, surprising from a list comprising so many
expert social scientists. And in what way was Israel’s response, carefully
targeting terrorist leaders, arms dumps, communication centres, and going out
of its way to avoid civilian casualties, ‘criminal’: do states not have a
right to protect their people against terrorist attack? ‘Ruthless’ and
‘criminal’ might better describe Hamas’ strategy of siting their military hardware among civilians, using their own people cruelly and cynically as
human shields. And ‘defenceless’? What about all that firepower aimed at Israel
in the past few weeks, including sophisticated weaponry supplied by Hamas’
paymasters in Tehran?

Moving
on:

The assassination of the Hamas’ military
commander, Ahmad al-Jabari, by Israel was intended to disrupt any chance for a
permanent cease fire between the two sides and caused the current cycle
of violence.

This is
quite breathtaking. Remember: before Israel targeted al-Jabiri, there was no
two-sided conflict requiring a 'ceasefire', just a one-sided campaign by Hamas and its proxies. It was this series of attacks that ‘caused’
the current cycle of violence: Israel’s careful targeting of one of its
masterminds was an attempt to end the violence. Again, it’s astonishing to
find academics who spend their professional lives analysing causation wilfully
misreading the obvious chain of cause and effect here.

For the last five years al-Jabari had been
responsible for limiting rocket attacks on Israel.

Far leftists are often unfairly accused of being implicit apologists for terror –
but this is a quite brazen apologia for a known terrorist. As Carlos Tomatis
(to whom I'm indebted for the original link to this letter) commented on Facebook: ‘These
fine people think that it's okay to attempt to murder random Jews as long as
you don't do it too often.’ It’s striking that the signatories to this letter
go out of their way to ‘understand’ a jihadist commander like al-Jabiri, but
refuse to extend any such understanding to his victims, or to those who seek to
curtail his terrorist activities.

The inaction of the
Western governments is further proof of their indifference to their
electorates’ wish to stop Israel from perpetrating yet another massacre against
the Palestinian people.

Again, ‘massacre’ hardly seems the appropriate word for
carefully targeted attacks against terrorist infrastructure – and what do they mean by the
other 'massacres' implied here? Have these supposedly thoughtful and critical academics bought into the myths of one side? And what ‘action’, exactly, do these signatories want western governments to take? Do
they want to stop Israel making any response to Hamas’
provocation - and if so, why?

We
call upon our governments, which have stood aloof and indifferent, in the face
of Palestine’s dispossession and colonization since 1948 to take
immediate and effective action. No other people in the world has been
subjected, for more than sixty years, to such relentless acts of collective
punishment and military brutality as have the Palestinian people.

‘Dispossession and colonization’ – these
are not the words of people seeking a two-state solution, one in
which Israelis and Palestinians live peacefully side-by-side in two legitimate nations. No, this is precisely the language of rejectionists who deny the legitimacy of the Jewish state, who seek to deny the Jewish people, alone in the world, a right to a homeland of their own. This is also the boilerplate rhetoric of the anti-imperialist far left, which seeks lazily to impose a false template, transferred from very different conflicts, on the complexities of the Middle East.

As for the second sentence in this
paragraph, it’s a downright, ugly lie. Even if
Israel’s admittedly imperfect treatment of the Palestinians could be
accurately described using terms such as 'collective punishment' and military brutality' (terms with, one suspects, deliberate and offensive overtones of Nazism and fascism - and by the way, did you see the actual collective punishment meted out by Hamas to suspected collaborators this week? - there's real fascism for you) - how can any sensible person say this is worse than (say) the treatment of the Kurds and Marsh Arabs by Saddam, or the Tibetans by the Chinese, or the East Timorese by the Indonesians? The list could go on indefinitely, and the more examples are adduced, the more absurd and offensive this letter's claim becomes. To accept that Israel's treatment of Palestinians could be compared to these brutal, genocidal campaigns would be to acknowledge that words have lost their meaning - again, surprising for a group of academics whose writings are often concerned with the precise nuances of language.

We
call for the removal of the blockade on the Gaza Strip, the free movement of
people and goods in and out of the region and a total cessation of lethal
attack from the air, land and sea, against a helpless civilian population in
one of the most densely-populated areas in the world.

At last, you may think, an end to
the rhetorical windbaggery, and something like a measured call for practical action. After all, even 'moderate' voices like Tony Blair have called for a removal of border restrictions between Israel and Gaza. But those voices also recognise, as this letter quite fails to do, the reason for those restrictions: the fact that, as events even this past week have shown, there are some who would abuse an open border to launch yet more terror attacks on Israel. And as for the sea blockade, surely the news this week of a secret Iranian shipment of weapons to Gaza has demonstrated that Israel is absolutely right to maintain this, for as long as Hamas and its backers in Tehran explicitly seek to destroy the state of Israel and call for genocide against the Jewish people.

The world cannot stand by when Palestine is
once more battered to death.

Sorry for
resorting to linguistic trivia, but that just isn't English: you can’t be battered to death more than once, any more than you can commit suicide twice. More seriously, it prompts the question: why did 'the world', including this esteemed collection of academics, 'stand by' a couple of weeks ago when Israel was literally being 'battered' by repeated rocket attacks out of Gaza? Where were the letters to the press then? The almost complete silence from the great and the good following that outbreak of violence, when taken together with this letter's complete disavowal of Hamas' role in the 'cycle of violence', not to mention the bloated and offensive rhetoric, might lead some people to wonder about the motivation of the letter writers. How would these academics, many of them skilled in textual analysis, respond themselves to this kind of text in other circumstances - a text so replete with absences and silences, and one which focuses its whole attention on the actions of one party in a conflict to the exclusion of all others?

By the way, I read that more than 400 Arabs of Palestinian origin have been killed in the civil war in Syria: maybe I haven't been paying attention, but I don't recall seeing any letters to the left-wing press protesting this particular massacre of Palestinians. One might wonder what it is about Israel that, alone of all the nations in the world, spurs such a hasty and vehement response from the combined academic 'left'. Some of those who signed this letter are acknowledged experts in the analysis of racism: I wonder what they would call it, if they came across another text in which one nation, one people, was singled out for such opprobrium, to the exclusion of all others, in defiance of all sense of balance and reason, and in such ugly and contemptuous terms?

From the start of the new year, one Israeli had been killed as a result of the Gazan attacks, while 78 Gazans had been killed by Israeli strikes. You might want to check that Martin but I think you know it's accurate without checking.

using their own people cruelly and cynically as human shields.

Your own source exposes the fallacy of this statement.

Examiner:

"On Sunday, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) hit a high-rise building occupied by several European media outlets, but the actual target of the missile strike were the offices of Al Aqsa, the television station of Hamas, as well as those of Al Quds, a Lebanese-based broadcaster, sympathetic to the Muslim terror group."

"Well, where my bureau is, there are residential accommodation around, and there are rockets going off — I think the thing about Gaza, to be honest with you is, it’s an incredibly small place and there’s a lot of people in it. So pretty much everywhere in Gaza is a residential area unless you’re going right up to the kind of "no man’s land" area between Israel and where Gaza kind of properly starts. So there certainly are things being fired off from residential areas but it’s almost, probably, impossible to get entirely away from a residential area if you want to fire something off."

You are effectively saying that Palestinians have no right to any kind of resistance, certainly not armed but not even broadcasting.

‘Dispossession and colonization’ – these are not the words of people seeking a two-state solution

But they're true whichever solution is sought.

this is precisely the language of rejectionists who deny the legitimacy of the Jewish state, who seek to deny the Jewish people, alone in the world, a right to a homeland of their own.

This is meaningless. Most Jews have "a homeland of their own" outside of Israel and the occupied territories. If you mean Jews as a collective identity group then you need to consider the many identity groups - Sikhs, Roma, Sinti and many many more - who are not the titular community of a "homeland of their own".

Regarding Palestinians killed in Syria, the Socialist Worker reported on that in March. The report you link to was September. Regarding lack of campaigning against Syria, there is campaigning against Syria by the most powerful governments in the west and in the mainstream media. Why bark when you have a dog? Contrast that with the approach to Israel. I don't find even hinting at antisemitism as an explanation here. I mean why do you do so much more for Israel than any other serial human rights abuser?

Regarding the disgusting way Hamas deals with collaborators, it is extremely brutal but it is not "collective punishment". Collective punishment is where a whole community is punished for the real or perceived actions of a few. In fairness I'll put that one in the same ball park as "once more battered to death" but I think your faux pas amounted to a worse mangling of the language but I suppose I would wouldn't I?

Not sure if I already tried posting this but here goes (again if appropriate)

just a one-sided campaign by Hamas and its proxies?

From the start of the new year, one Israeli had been killed as a result of the Gazan attacks, while 78 Gazans had been killed by Israeli strikes. You might want to check that Martin but I think you know it's accurate without checking.

using their own people cruelly and cynically as human shields.

Your own source exposes the fallacy of this statement.

Examiner:

"On Sunday, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) hit a high-rise building occupied by several European media outlets, but the actual target of the missile strike were the offices of Al Aqsa, the television station of Hamas, as well as those of Al Quds, a Lebanese-based broadcaster, sympathetic to the Muslim terror group."

"Well, where my bureau is, there are residential accommodation around, and there are rockets going off — I think the thing about Gaza, to be honest with you is, it’s an incredibly small place and there’s a lot of people in it. So pretty much everywhere in Gaza is a residential area unless you’re going right up to the kind of "no man’s land" area between Israel and where Gaza kind of properly starts. So there certainly are things being fired off from residential areas but it’s almost, probably, impossible to get entirely away from a residential area if you want to fire something off."

You are effectively saying that Palestinians have no right to any kind of resistance, certainly not armed but not even broadcasting.

‘Dispossession and colonization’ – these are not the words of people seeking a two-state solution

But they're true whichever solution is sought.

this is precisely the language of rejectionists who deny the legitimacy of the Jewish state, who seek to deny the Jewish people, alone in the world, a right to a homeland of their own.

This is meaningless. Most Jews have "a homeland of their own" outside of Israel and the occupied territories. If you mean Jews as a collective identity group then you need to consider the many identity groups - Sikhs, Roma, Sinti and many many more - who are not the titular community of a "homeland of their own".

Regarding Palestinians killed in Syria, the Socialist Worker reported on that in March. The report you link to was September. Regarding lack of campaigning against Syria, there is campaigning against Syria by the most powerful governments in the west and in the mainstream media. Why bark when you have a dog? Contrast that with the approach to Israel. I don't find even hinting at antisemitism as an explanation here. I mean why do you do so much more for Israel than any other serial human rights abuser?

Regarding the way Hamas deals with collaborators, it is extremely brutal but it is not "collective punishment". Collective punishment is where a whole community is punished for the real or perceived actions of a few. In fairness I'll put that one in the same ball park as "once more being battered to death" but I think your faux pas amounted to a worse mangling of the language, in fact "once more being battered to death" explains what is happening, albeit clunkily. Collective punishment doesn't explain the killing of six people at all.

If you're not accepting counter comment, could you be a decent chap and make a note to that effect?

Apologies for not publishing these comment sooner - and thanks for them. Probably too late to respond in detail now - which is not meant to be an avoidance strategy. I'll return to this issue in due course...I missed these comments because I only sign into this blog occasionally - something I intend to rectify in the New Year (though it might go the way of all New Year resolutions...).